Getting Started in Tradewinds Odyssey

Tradewinds Odyssey takes the franchise to Mythical Greece, and a good part of your time will be spent responding to the God’s constant meddling. Since you’ll be sailing all over the place running errands for one and against another, you may as well amass a personal fortune while you are at it.

That means there are two basic things you need to do well to advance in the game: trading and questing. Come to think of it, the Gods you put one over on tend to hold a grudge, and they’ll send all kinds of beasts after you to obtain revenge, so combat is also important, but we will worry about that later on. For now…

Depending on which character you choose, you will be faced with different quests. Despite this, there are some common points you can learn that will serve you well, no matter who represents your trading empire.

In most cases, someone will give you a quest right from the get go. If you don’t get one right away, or don’t know how to proceed, look for the question marks (see image at right). Click on the building to enter. If no one mentions anything about the quest to you, click on the Talk button (see image below)

It won’t be long before your quests will require you to hit the waves. But before you leave town, you should fill your ships’ holds with some trade goods.

Trading takes place at the Agora, which you can click on from the City View, or reach from anywhere in a city by clicking on the icon with the bottle, amphora, and scroll. You start at the Buy Screen, which shows goods for sale in the Agora. You can type in numbers to the right of the good in question, and the cost will appear below beside the Buy button. You can keep typing in quantities for several goods, and your total will appear next to the Buy button.

You can also click the Max button to the right of the amount window. This sets the amount to the most you can fit in your ships, or the most you can afford, which ever is lower. Your fleet’s cargo capacity is shown at the upper left, above the list of goods. The Max buttons account for the amounts you already have typed in for other goods, so if you have other purchases planned, hitting Max won’t upset them. However you get the amounts in, hit Buy when you are happy to give up the cash and take on the goods.

To the left of the Buy button is a Reset All button, which you can use if you get all your amounts messed up and want to start over. The area to the right of the Buy button has buttons to Leave (return to the City View), Talk (to get info or advance a Quest as described above), or go to the Sell Screen.

The Sell Screen is reached from the eponymous button on the Buy Screen at the Agora As one might expect, the Sell and Buy Screens are quite similar. Instead of listing goods you can buy, Selling displays your current cargo. The amount windows work in the same way, and the Max buttons now set the amount to the number of that good you are carrying. The Sell button executes the sale of the entered amounts, getting you the cash listed above the button.

The big difference is the Reset All button is replaced by Sell All. It will dump your cargo for whatever it is worth in the current city, which you don’t generally want to do. There is no Are You Sure or Undo feature, so don’t sneeze when your mouse is in this part of the screen.

The area to the right of the Sell button again allows you to Leave the Agora and return to the City View, switch to the Buy Screen, or Talk to advance a Quest. Speaking of Quests, now that you have a fleet full of trade goods, you are ready to get back to helping the Gods resolve their petty, though humourous, squabbles.

From the City View, hit Set Sail in the lower right corner. You’ll see a map of the Aegean similar to the one at left. Cities you have to get to for Quests are indicated by question marks. The main Quest thread has a gold and orange mark (as seen on Troia in the north east corner of our map) and secondary ones are flagged in silvery blue (Herkalion in the south).

The same colours of question marks with the same meanings will help you find the buildings you need to visit to advance the quest once you get to the City, at least at first. Soon after you start the game, you lose this bit of spoon feeding: you will still get Question Marks to help you on the Map, but no help in the cities themselves.

Quests will usually have some indication as to where you need to go (check your Journal via the button at the bottom of your screen). If that doesn’t help, dealing with religious figures usually happens at the Altar or Reliquary, scholarly types are usually at the Gymnasion, Politicians at the Acropolis, and stuff you need to buy at the Agora. Remember to hit the talk button to move things along.

Sailing to a city on the sea map is as simple as clicking on it, but it takes longer to sail further, so try to knock Quests out while you are in the neighborhood, and don’t hesitate to make trading stops along the way.

As the game goes on, trading gets really involved, but to get started, you only need to worry about Salt, Olives and Honey. Buy salt for less than 20, sell it for more than 25, Olives are a decent buy under 30 and sell them for over 50, and Honey can be bought for as much as 60 and sold for 90 or more. Obviously, if you can buy cheaper and sell higher, you’ll do better, but those rules of thumb should be enough to keep your operation from going bankrupt.

Also, as soon as you have more than 10,000 drachmas, start checking in with Shipyards about growing your fleet. Skip the Small Vessels. Go with Penteconters and Uniremes as good low cost options until you have the big bucks called for by nicer boats.

Follow the question marks, stop and trade along the way, and grow your fleet. Soon, the Gods will owe you favours. Well, at least the ones you’ve been helping. Once you find that some other Gods are starting to take unwanted notice of you, or maybe it’s just fleets of mundane pirates that are causing your peaceful trade operations problems, you will want to check out our Combat Guide for Tradewinds Odyssey.